Galaxy S6 To Come With Pre-Installed Microsoft Apps

Samsung flaship phone Galaxy S6, which is to be unveiled on March 1, might come with pre-installed Microsoft apps, reports SamMobile. These apps include Microsoft OneNote, OneDrive, Office Mobile (with a free Office 365 subscription), and Skype. The apps will take place of bloatware, a major turn-off for consumers, that came with previous Samsung phones.

But having Samsung offer Microsoft’s apps on a flagship phone is undoubtedly the biggest treat for Microsoft so far. Yes, these apps are already available on iOS App Store and Android Play Store but this move will not even make Microsoft to get users to search for its apps and download them. The users will already have the apps so they would give them a try, resulting in more active users for the company.

Moreover, it would reduce the switching barrier consumers face if they want to switch from an iOS or Android phone to a Windows phone.

From consumers’ point of view, most of them are already tired of the bloatware apps that come with Samsung phones. These apps cannot even be removed, thereby offering poor user experience. Having Microsoft apps such as Office and Skype would be tolerable because these are already used by most of the people. Even if not, these apps would arguably be better than the previous bloatware apps.

The move wouldn’t hurt Samsung either. Firstly, the Korean company doesn’t have any competing apps of its own. Moreover, these apps would offer better user experience on Galaxy S6 and Samsung could use these apps as a selling point.

So it is a win-win for Samsung and Microsoft.

Google, however, would not be happy because the sole reason of Android is to make consumers use Google services such as Gmail, Drive, and Docs. The more the users spend time using these services, the more data is gathered by Google which is then used for advertising — the major source of revenue for the search giant. So if the consumers are using Microsoft apps on an Android phone, Google is not getting the data necessary to generate revenue.

Apart from offering pre-installed Microsoft apps, Samsung is also rumored to offer optimized version of TouchWiz, which is believed to be even faster than Android Lollipop on Galaxy Note 4.